10 & 30 South Wacker Chicago

Performing Without a Net... Modern airplanes no longer "fly by the wire." That is, wires no longer connect the cockpit to the flight controls like the rudder. Instead, electric circuits connect the pilot to mechanical devices to maneuver the aircraft. Technology powers aviation progress. So can real estate also learn to "fly without the wire"?

Last week in Chicago, Paul Saccone, VP - Engineering, and Colleen Murray, Customer Services Coordinator (now Leasing Assistant), demonstrated how Equity Office is learning to "fly without the wire" (that is, manage without paper). They use Angus AnyWhere from Angus Systems Group to manage service orders at 10 & 30 South Wacker, a 2-million square foot office complex, and Equity Office has implemented Angus company wide in over 119 million square feet.

Under the old work order system, Equity Office would send a stack of paper each month to tenants documenting every work order on a separate sheet. Much of this information was manually prepared and later had to be re-keyed into Equity Office's accounting system. The new Angus system flows entirely out of a database, which makes it much easier to produce reports and provide accountability to tenants.

According to Chris Gale of Angus, the strategic value is the ability to report and compare at the building, regional, or portfolio level. For example, Equity Office can easily generate a very simple bar chart showing the performance of each region or all buildings within a region. And even more powerfully, Angus (currently installed in over 320 million square feet) would eventually like to enable you to compare your performance to an anonymous pool of similar properties -- of course, with the permission of the other owners. Maybe we should call this "managing by bar chart."

Happy Holidays! ... The PikeNet Dispatch will take a break until the New Year. Hope that you can spend time with your family and loved ones. The next issue will be sent Thursday, January 2, 2003.

--Peter Pike